Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences - Riding the Roller Coaster of Sustainable Design for a Research/Teaching Laboratory at Lake Tahoe

Peter H. Rumsey, P.E., Rumsey Engineers, Inc.
Bill Starr, University of California at Davis

The University of California, Davis and Sierra Nevada College are building the premier laboratory for research and teaching on the Lake Tahoe Environment. The design goal of the building was to achieve a LEED® platinum rating at a reasonable cost. The energy use of the proposed building is 60 percent lower than ASHRAE 90.1. The water use is projected at less than 50 percent of the normal amount of water for a similar building. These results tell only half of the story.

The process to achieve these results was difficult and hard won. With two enthusiastic owners, the design team had to report to two clients as well as a host of experts that were brought into review and supply ideas for the building.

Over 30 different systems were analyzed for their contribution to the sustainability goals, including cogeneration, photovoltaics, lab HVAC options without reheat, heat recovery, daylighting, high performance glazing, DALI lighting systems and snowmelt catchment. Some had substantial impact while some were more educational in nature with smaller impacts. The process of sorting through and prioritizing the sustainability options is one that many design teams face. The trick is to evaluate what often appear to be individual strategies as systems. When strategies are combined into systems, the synergies of these strategies are more cost effective and practical.

The finished building also features a monitoring and information system to evaluate the building's performance, based on over 500 points monitored by the Siemens Apogee control system. The system will assist in commissioning the building, explaining its elaborate operation to the occupants, many of whom are college students, and give users a sense of ownership and an incentive to improve the building's performance. The use of the Siemens system avoids the installation of a proprietary or hand-made system, allowing adoption by other facilities with similar control systems.

Labs21 Connection:

Best practice sustainable design requires a good deal of innovation and collaboration to consider a wide variety of alternatives to traditional design. Collaboration between the clients and design team and inclusion of the contractor during the design in a framework of sustainability and innovation were remarkable in this project.

The monitoring system will allow for elaborate research and auditing into a building's operation. Through a user-friendly interface, it will allow the building's occupants, mainly undergraduates and scientific and academic staff members, to understand how the building works and how their actions affect the buildings' efficiency and their comfort.

Biographies:

Peter Rumsey, President of Rumsey Engineers, has over 20 years of experience in the engineering and energy field, and is a nationwide leader in sustainable and efficient design of government, scientific, and private sector buildings and critical environments, such as laboratories, cleanrooms, data centers, and research facilities.

Peter's passion of energy-efficient and sustainable design issues has led him to publish several papers on HVAC energy efficiency. He is the author of a column in Environmental Design and Construction magazine discussing and debating sustainable design issues. For Critical Environments, Peter wrote an article on Laboratory Efficiency in the ASHRAE Journal and was a team leader in a Data Center Efficiency Design Charette for the Rocky Mountain Institute.

He has worked on the design and improvement of buildings in three continents and is a registered mechanical engineer in nine states, including California, Oregon, Arizona, and Texas.

He is a Certified Energy Manager and a member of the ASHRAE Cleanrooms Committee (TC9.11). In 2002, he was awarded the Energy Engineer of the Year Award from the Bay Area chapter of the Association of Energy Engineers. Peter has a Bachelors of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Bill Starr is a Senior Architect and Project Manager with the University of California, Davis, office of Architects & Engineers (A&E). He specializes in managing projects with challenging energy conservation and environmental goals. He is currently managing the Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences, the Veterinary Medicine Instructional Facility, and the Veterinary Medicine 3B Laboratory Building. All three projects are targeting LEED® Silver certification or higher. The Veterinary Medicine Instructional Facility recently received a Higher Education Energy Partnership Best Practice Award in Overall Sustainable Design.

Bill is a member of the UC Davis Sustainability Committee and chairs the Green Building Subcommittee. He co-authored his office's sustainable design policy and the Davis campus' LEED baseline. He has also integrated sustainable design measures into the UCD Campus Standards & Design Guide. His particular interests are the program-embedded choices that effect energy use and the use of daylighting in the indoor environment. Bill has been practicing architecture for over 15 years and has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University.

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